Obamacare's threat to liberalism

From the moment of his improbable emergence as a presidential contender seven years ago, Barack Obama has always positioned himself as something better than a politician. And he has always presented his goals for progressive change as something bigger than the bare minimum a Democrat might hope for in a country that skews center-right.

So the fiasco of the launch of Obama’s sweeping health care overhaul has put the reputation of Big Government progressivism at risk for at least this generation. And its future now rests on the president’s ability to reverse that debacle and to demonstrate that his approach to covering millions of uninsured Americans is not only an enlightened — but workable — policy. He set the bar himself.

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6 major players in ACA debacle

In “The Audacity of Hope,” the best-selling 2006 manifesto that launched his presidential quest, Obama dismissed the achievements of the most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. “In the first two years of his presidency,” Obama wrote of Clinton, “he would be forced to abandon some core elements of his platform — universal health care, aggressive investment in education and training — that might have more decisively reversed the long-term trends that were undermining the position of working families in the new economy.” In the end, Obama sniffed, Clinton’s policies were “recognizably progressive if modest in their goals.”

Those words mean that much more is riding on the success or failure of Obama’s signature domestic policy than the fate of this president. Emboldened conservatives and worried liberals alike agree that the future of the Democratic Party’s plausible agenda, and of liberalism itself, is on the line.

Obama’s challenge is now nothing less than to assure that the cycle of progressivism he presumed to usher in, and the period of renewed faith and confidence in the transformative powers of government that he promised, does not die aborning. That will be no easy task.

“Unlike the Republican agenda, the Democratic agenda does not work unless people have a certain level of trust in the competence of the government to act on their behalf,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who 25 years ago helped launch the centrist “New Democratic” agenda that brought the Democrats back from years in the presidential wilderness. “That is, if you will, the Democratic proposition. It’s not to say that the government should do everything, but it is to say there’s an indispensable — and not necessarily small — role for government at every level.”

Conservative thinkers have already seized on the rocky rollout of Obamacare — and the indefensible management failures it implies — as proof positive that the age-old argument over the proper role of state action in American life has reached a fresh danger point for the Democrats.

“At stake is the new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism introduced by Obama, of which Obamacare is both symbol and concrete achievement,” wrote the columnist Charles Krauthammer. “Its unraveling would catastrophically undermine their ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.”

Fouad Ajami of Stanford’s Hoover Institution wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “a leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country, a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things, not the culmination.”

And the conservative theorist Yuval Levin argued in National Review Online that Obama’s sudden decision last week to allow insurers to continue to offer private health plans that do not meet his new federal standards for comprehensive coverage — made in response to panic from congressional Democrats at the public outcry over cancelled policies — could gravely undermine the economic viability of the new health insurance market by allowing healthier people to opt out.

“It suggests that the administration is giving up on the long game of doing what it takes to get the system into place, and then trusting that the public will come around,” Levin wrote, “and is adopting instead the mentality of a political war of attrition, fought news cycle by news cycle, in which the goal is to survive and gain some momentary advantage, rather than to achieve a larger and well-defined objective.”

Anxious congressional Democrats face a fight-or-flight dilemma of their own. For all their worries, abandoning Obamacare is no easy proposition. They supported its creation and understand that their constituents need health care reform — they cannot continue with the flawed old system that left so many shut out.

The White House, for its part, pooh-poohs such doomsday talk.

“This is obviously a challenge, and we’re facing the challenge, and we’re up to the challenge,” press secretary Jay Carney insisted on Friday.

But more dispassionate analysts — even sympathetic ones — say it would be hard to overstate the danger of this moment, for Obama and for Democrats more broadly. From the beginning, Obama sketched his agenda for the country as the sort that succeeds only once a generation, if then.